Hugo Burge is the founder of here or there. Visit their blog here.

Can you tell me a little about your personal background?

Sure. I got involved in Cheapflights in March 2000 as an investor buying out the founder, who was working on his own in an attic in South London, UK.

I guess my background was as an entrepreneur. Initially there were three of us, carrying boxes up from his attic with all hands on deck. I am not a techie but apart from that I have done just about every job in the company.

In May 2003 I went to set up the US office and launch Cheapflights.com, again with 3 people.

Do you have an educational background in business?

Well, I did Geography as a degree... I guess that doesn't count.

I am a professionally qualified Company Secretary, which is a term you may not be used to. It is like doing the first 2 years of an MBA.

Companies legally need one in the UK. Otherwise I picked up business skills by starting my own property investment companies and, in addition, a small web design partnership with a friend.

Where is here or there currently based?

In London. We have the Lead Designer and myself in London with outsourced development in Poland.

Can you briefly describe what here or there is?

Sure, here is the elevator pitch: Love travel? Share travel experience with the best tools. The ultimate goal is to resolve the conundrum of offering better and more relevant travel inspiration.

What is the current state of the service?

The current state of the service is that we have just launched into beta within the last 2 weeks. We had a month or so of alpha where we secretly tested with friends, family and my mother.

In the last week we had just over 2,000 visits and over 14,000 page impressions. We have not actually announced the site yet. I have some exclusive consumer consumer press coverage in a major UK newspaper coming out tomorrow. Hopefully that is the start of the proper traffic growth. Funnily enough we don't want everyone to come at once. We want to start slow and improve the product. It is crucial to get the product and the viral element right: it has to work so that word of mouth takes over. Early days...

What is your business model?

Advertising with later development phases based around inspirational travel deals and destination hotels/places to stay.

It is worth noting that right now there is no advertising on the site, we are focused on building a tool that works.

Can you share what technologies have gone into making this service?

Sure. Now, remember that I am no tech guy, so I am a little dangerous when describing this area. I like to focus on the product and everything else is secondary. That said, what I can say is that we are using Ruby on Rails and Ajax, which has given us a lot of flexibility in creating nice user interfaces.

How many people are working on this? How large is the company?

We are a very lean and mean team right now. It is myself (and I still have a day job at Cheapflights + HOWZAT media), 1 design lead and design support in London. We have 2 developers time in Poland. Everyone is part time right now and doing other things too.

We do not actually have a company formed yet. This is a personal venture initially. I am hoping to shortly announce joint-venture that will happen at the same time as funding and incorporation. The beta mode is proof of concept and getting some momentum.

Have you raised any funding yet?

Yes, I do intend to and this would be a natural fit for HOWZAT media. It is just a matter of timing.

I do like the fact that a little bit of money can get you a long way with today's technology. We are not trying to build a complex and expensive tool. The key is simplicity. Too much money can be spent too easily but we are in the process of an initial seed funding round which I anticipate will be followed by a more significant funding once the JV is in place.

Money will be needed to bring on board a permanent product manager, editorial skills (I am not a writer) and help get the word out in a modest way. The focus is building a better mousetrap.

How much time do you suppose the average user will spend on here or there?

Over the last month the average time spent on the site is 10 minutes. This may be rather longer than usual because we have a lot of early stage users adding content. It will depend of course as there are two main types of users: contributors and browsers.

These two types of users make any averages a little misleading and not very useful. To be honest I am not quite sure how long users will spend on the site. The better the content the longer they will browse. The better the interface to upload travel experiences the less time they will spend. Figure that one out! Time spent on the site is not a core metric for me. I am more interested in repeat users, the average number of travel experiences created/ read, number of pages per entry etc.

So have you relied on word of mouth advertising so far?

Yes, all word of mouth. Not a dime (penny) spent on marketing so far.

What did you learn at Cheapflights and how does this build on what you have learned?

Well, I have made a lot of mistakes at Cheapflights but I won't bore you with those! I have also learnt a lot in the 7 years I have spent here. Wow, this could be a big topic but I will try to cover a few themes...

1. Product differentiation is key. The Founder of Cheapflights was passionate about the concept of Mousetrap and word of mouth advertising. If you create something useful then folks will come. We never spent any money on offline advertising at Cheapflights and this has stood me in good stead.

2. Cheapflights re-invented classified advertising in the travel sections of traditional media and created a consumer service. I look at the main content in traditional travel media (magazines, TV and newspapers) and a lot of the travel focus is on inspiration. I see an opportunity to do this better on the web.

3. Performance based advertising is a winner. Ultimately scalable and if you can make the advertising content useful to consumers then you have a virtuous circle.

4. Overwhelming simplicity cannot be over-rated. I have hear Cheapflights criticised for being overly simplistic and not technologically lead but it works and has strengths that have helped it win in the long term.

5. Profitability at Cheapflights has been a wonderful thing... seeing us through the Internet nuclear winter of the early naughties. I hope we can get there as soon as possible with hereorthere.com.

6. The US market is a wonderfully large opportunity and whilst many UK companies avoid it, I believe we should give it a go...